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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3718 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Other criticisms aside, I think EY was trying to do three things at once, but fell short with two of them due to internal contradictions. He wanted it to be 1) a teaching tool for rationality, and also 2) to have a literary character arc where Harry learns and grows, and also 3) to max out his personal sense of cool (hereafter "EY-cool"). But 2 and 3 hide 1, making it hard to tell what's actually a recommended course of action, because the bad stuff seems precisely as EY-cool as the good stuff. And 1 and 3 hide 2, because Harry is relentlessly portrayed as EY-cool, whether or not he's making mistakes. And so what comes through is a lot of EY-cool, sprinkled with a bunch of rationality lessons where you need to read the entire thing, possibly several times, to figure out what's a recommended approach (not to mention keeping up with the replication crisis), and a character who goes from being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly silly, to being portrayed as smarter and more mature than everyone around him, but slightly sad. (But maybe that's how EY views his own personal development.)

Interesting analysis, and exactly the sort of thing I was asking for elsewhere in the thread. I read the whole thing in more or less one sitting for fun, and so while I wasn't terribly impressed and definately think it suffers from some a lot of the problems I perceive in rationalist fic generally, I'm not at all confident that I really got the intended message.

It’s quite a book, and for me the most underrated aspect is how endgame HPJEV is a metaphor for how quick-takeoff AI constrained by alignment measures might still be able to do significant harm.

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